I may get banned for this! No, seriously, a few of you may find it interesting. Its roots lie in the "we were both doing the exact same thing but he caught 5 fish and I caught none" rubric. Then, the statement is followed by something like "he was throwing a blue fleck with a chartreuse tail, mine was just blue fleck" or something like that. Then, the result is supposed to be attributable to the chartreuse tail paint. Maybe, maybe not.

We all know, should know, that means almost nothing, that there is a randomness to things that competes with skills making it hard to determine how to account for end results. But, if you hand a fair coin to 1024 people in an auditorium, one of them, statistically, will flip all heads or tails over 10 flips. In this case, it has nothing to do with skill, all luck.

So, I changed the odds to "1 in 10" for some fishing presentation, gosh I wish, and I ran a study of what the results would look like for two fisherman, equally skilled, fishing side-by-side, each with a 1 in 10 chance of catching a fish on each cast.

One in ten over a thousand casts? Statistically, that should net out 100 catches for each fisherman, but how often would each of them end up with the same fish total?

The way I set it up in Excel, I could "pulse" my result over and over but the graph I created would always look about the same, a sort of normal distribution.

The result, over a thousand casts, two fisherman both caught the same number of fish slightly less than 10% of the time (look for the zero label). It falls off to each side viewing it from the perspective of one of the fisherman, the number of times he does way better or way worse than his partner.

Anyway, in a nutshell, one can go ahead and assume it is all about a worm color that day, or line color, or, or, or . . . the list is endless.

But, there is always that randomness to consider.

Class over. Take a look at the little chart. The number labels at each point are zero for the percentage of time with the same result and then one guy's over and underperformance.

Oh! What set this off was a few recent posts about KVD and I wondered to myself since all of the great bass anglers have great boats, great equipment and great stuff, whether what he does is sort of "out Billy Ball" other anglers. In essence, does he just "get" ways to create edges and then apply them?

I don't know, but if I were a million dollar a year professional bass angler, or wanting to be one, I think I'd hire the equivalent of a sabermetrician ( a baseball stat dude) to try to find every little statistical advantage I could take advantage of.

I can think of 20 or more stats I'd want to know from raw data that we otherwise just act intuitively on. Nothing wrong with intuition, but a dab of science/math likely wouldn't hurt.

I don't know, but if I were a million dollar a year professional bass angler, or wanting to be one, I think I'd hire the equivalent of a sabermetrician ( a baseball stat dude) to try to find every little statistical advantage I could take advantage of.

I can think of 20 or more stats I'd want to know from raw data that we otherwise just act intuitively on. Nothing wrong with intuition, but a dab of science/math likely wouldn't hurt.

I'm so with you on this. I don't know of anyone who has looked at fishing behavior from a scientific or statistical standpoint in order to improve performance. There's room for it in the industry, I bet. You could be the first fish-o-metrics consultant

With a PhD. in Statatistics, I applaud your thought process, but as mentioned every cast whether a fish bit or not is mutually expclusive to all other casts, UNLESS you are into a school of biting fish, then there would have to be some subset of factors to either ignore or not interpret those occasions. THIS is why I keep exquisite logs and it does pay off, quite often. Hope this helps.

With a PhD. in Statatistics, I applaud your thought process, but as mentioned every cast whether a fish bit or not is mutually expclusive to all other casts, UNLESS you are into a school of biting fish, then there would have to be some subset of factors to either ignore or not interpret those occasions. THIS is why I keep exquisite logs and it does pay off, quite often. Hope this helps.

Tight lines, keep safe and good luck.

Thad Rains

Good for you. I had to drop statistics twice in college and take an alternative for my math credits (I'm terrible in math, obviously). What do you do, if you don't mind me asking? Do you use your PHD?

Yes, each cast is mutually exclusive, just like flipping a coin. For that one person, statistically, in a group of 1024 who flips a coin all heads or tails ten straight times? His or her next flip is STILL a 50/50 outcome using a fair coin.

My greater point was to show via randomness that there should be no expectation of equal outcomes, that then we shouldn't read too much into why our results are better or worse than our partner's and start changing things, variables.

I'm fighting the silliness of "I used XXX line one time and my line snapped, so it must be all bad and I'll never use it again." We shouldn't think that "one time" is statistically relevant, but we are mostly inductive thinkers so we move along that way and away from the math stuff. So, one guy goes out and has a really good experience with power fishing, and that's all it takes; another guy doesn't and he swears off of it. It may have been randomness.

A Fisher-matrician quiz:

If KVD is a well known power fisherman (he is) and with a trusted crankbait, has a 1 out of 30 catch rate (I'm making this up), but the fish he catches tend to be 1.1 times as large as, let's say, Aaron Marten's who is a well-known finesse fisherman, who catches a fish drop-shotting 1 out of 15 "drops," and KVD can make four times as many casts (it's a faster presentation so let's say 2 casts per minute) to Marten's drops, who on a statistical basis catches the biggest bag after the same unit of time, say 2 hours of fishing?

We don't have to know this, but if you have a $100,000 riding on the outcome, don't you think a pro ought to sort of make sure he is not too far off the best odds?